While Mangas and Cochise were rampaging through the Southwest, the Union sent 2,000 volunteer soldiers into the same area to reassert control. Mangas and Cochise along with 200 Apaches attacked a detachment of 100 Union soldiers. During the fight Mangas was shot in the chest. His fellow warriors carried him 120 miles to an anglo doctor that the Apaches, uncharacteristicly, had much trust in. The Apaches threatened the doctor that if Mangas did not recover they were going to kill everyone in the town. The doctor was able to save him (Sharp).
After his injury Mangas reached out one last time for peace with the Americans. In late summer of 1862, Mangas met with an intermediary to issue a call to the Americans for peace talks (Sharp). Disregarding the advice of his peers, Mangas decided to attend the meeting in person, accompanied by an escort of twelve warriors. Under a white flag of peaceful negotiations, the Americans took Mangas hostage and sent his escort back to the tribe to deliver the news. The Americans then encarcerated Mangas in an adobe cell. The soldiers began to torture Mangas around midnight by heating their bayonettes in a fire and pressing them against his body. The soldiers then shot him to death because “he was trying to escape” on Januarry 18th, 1863. The soldiers buried him in a low grave. Then the next day the soldiers dug him back up, decapitated his body, boiled the skull to remove the skin, and finally sent the skull to a phrenologious in New York (Carter). The Apaches were furious at the disrespect and desecration of their leader's body because they now believed he would walk among the spirit world forever headless. The other Apache tribes were so furious they clashed with the Americans for another quarter of a century (Sharp).
With the help of Mangas, Cochise, and a few other Apache chiefs, the Apaches were able to hold off the Americans and Mexicans longer than any other tribe in America. Mangas' strength as a warrior and fearlessness in battle has made him immortal in the text books of his enemy as a heroic chief who spread fear in his enemies and defeated armies many times greater in size than his own. Against unimaginable odds Mangas had survived a lethal shot to the chest and still reached for friendship with the very government that killed him. Mangas Coloradas will be remembered in history as one of the strongest leaders of the Apaches (Sharp).
Works Cited
Carter, Forrest. Watch For Me On The Mountain. New York: Dell Publishing, May 1990
Sharp, Jay W. The Night They Shot Mangas Coloradas.
